How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

by James K.A. Smith

This disembedded, buffered, individualist view of the self seeps into our social imaginary — into the very way that we imagine the world, well before we ever think reflectively about it. We absorb it with our mother’s milk, so to speak, to the extent that it’s very difficult for us to imagine the world otherwise: “once we are well installed in the modern social imaginary, it seems the only possible one” (p. 168). And yet, Taylor’s point is that this is an imaginary — not that this is all just a fiction, but rather that this is a “take” on the world. While we have come to assume that this is just “the way things are,” in fact what we take for granted is contingent and contestable. But before we can contest it, we need to further understand it.